


Harvesting Words: A Lexical Fairy Tale

by writernotwaiting



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fairy Tale Style, Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:51:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4148982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writernotwaiting/pseuds/writernotwaiting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In a small factory on the edge of town, bulk-bought, second-hand novels are fed into a complex machine. A patented process separate form and content. The blank books are sold in upmarket stationers. The only by-products are clouds of stories that are dispersed by the wind."<br/>Across the mountains, fragments of stories begin accumulating against Alice's garden wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harvesting Words: A Lexical Fairy Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a cartoon by Tom Gault for The New Yorker. Used here with the artist's permission.  
> This may or may not become the first part of a series.

Intro by hornedchick:

Some of them get caught up in fast air currents and just blow away. Others drift until they meet a receptive ear and waft gently in, like smoke. Then you look up suddenly and say to yourself, ‘Hey, how about a story about…’

*****

Over in the next valley, though, Alice's house seemed to be particularly poorly placed in terms of the cross winds, because she found that stray words kept accumulating in large drifts against her garden wall. At first she just bagged them up and put them out with the trash. But after a bit she began to feel that it was a little wasteful and wondered if they would make decent compost material. So she raked them up over the summer and when the time came to overturn the garden she began scooping them up to spread across the soil.

This was for the most part fairly easy as much of the pile consisted merely of individual words. Every once in a while she would come a cross a simply dazzling phrase that she stopped to admire. Occasionally she found a complete sentence.

She slowed down when she got to the bottom of the pile — a drift of periods and commas had sifted to the bottom. These she had to pick up. One. At. A . Time. For if she tried to go faster she found she took very . . . long pauses and often . . . lost her . . . train of thought. So her long, brown fingers dropped them each into the wheelbarrow before she spread them out on the freshly turned soil. Alice paid particular attention to the north side of the house, as well as various bare patches where nothing ever seemed to grow — beneath the trees, under the roses, along the back garden wall. She worked the soil with care, breaking up hard clumps of clay.

Once finished, she turned everything over once more and re-planted her bulbs. As days got shorter and daylight became scarce, Alice pushed herself to complete the work. She sluggishly piled leftover words and fragments around the roses and delicate Japanese maple as mulch.

As fall moved toward the solstice, Alice shrank with the sunshine, sleeping long hours, moving from the bed to the rocking chair as if through molasses, as if the long nights drained the light out of her as she waited out the long dark of winter to see the results of her work.

They were mixed, at best. In some places, the garden grew more lush than it ever had before. But in places, bare spots appeared where flowers had previously grown luxuriantly, while in others the plants seemed to grow a bit funny. Some had twisted stems. Others were odd colors. Some of the tomatoes tasted off, and the mint carried a hint of sulfur for some reason.

The roses, too, were oddly affected. Some seemed to grow positively wild. One in particular bloomed heavy with unnaturally deep red blooms, and prickers that were so sharp they approached deadly. Another grew the sweetest antique yellow blossoms with nary a thorn in sight.

 _Well,_ she supposed, _I will have to be a bit more selective in how I place the compost next time._

And so she was. The next fall, rather than simply spreading things around willy nilly, she carefully chose the words depending on what she wanted to plant where. One sort of verbiage for the vegetable patch. Another sort for the spring flowers. Another sort entirely for the roses — a novella of a carefully selected domestic lexicon — these flowers, in particular, needed to be reigned in before they became positively wild and impossible to care for.

She saved the brightest words for the persistent problem areas — trying to bring light into the shadows. Under the trees, she liberally sprinkled phrases light with optimism, metaphors sunny with hope, images colored with luminescence.

Once finished, she was left with a veritable thesaurus of words that seemed altogether inappropriate for the plants she grew. Her garden burgeoned with sun-loving flowers and vegetables —roses, gladiolas, sunflowers, tomatoes. She lived for those bright rays of the sun, warming her dark skin, glinting off the waves of her black hair. She loved the world when it dazzled brightly like her own brilliant smile, and she laughed often to see the growing things she nurtured.

Much of the word hoard that remained seemed more suited to moonshine. They were, indeed, quite beautiful, some so lovely they filled her brown eyes with tears, and she lingered over them, listening to their chime, or to their lovely bass notes. Yet she rejected them, set these aside. _Darkness has no proper place in a garden_. Those words were silver, where her garden was golden.

Still other words she set aside as somewhat too lush. She wished her garden small and domesticated, not jungle-wild.

She carefully piled these leftovers into a sheltered corner and covered them with a sturdy tarp, in the hopes she could think of something to do with them in the spring, though she didn’t know what. Once again, Alice’s energies grew short with the daylight. She moved slowly through the winter days, and slept deeply through the long nights.

*****

The garden came up more fruitful than ever before. She spent so much time training vines, pruning hedges, and pulling weeds that she hadn’t any time to sift through the miscellany of leftover words sitting at the back of the yard. In fact, she gave it no thought whatsoever. She basked in the returning daylight, and had no time for the darkness.

One evening at the start of summer, however, just as she washing up the supper dishes at twilight, she caught a bit of movement in the backyard. She paused, soapy coffee cup halfway between the dishtub and the faucet.

_Someone’s messing in my garden._

A pale figure knelt down next to an empty flower bed beneath the trees.

_Is he planting something?_

Just then, just as she watched, he sat back on his heels to survey his work, and Alice caught full view of his profile. Her gaze was caught. His face was all angles in precisely the right places, and soft exactly where he ought to be. Inky black hair accentuated his pale complexion, and sinewy muscles rippled under his black shirt as he stretched to work the kinks out of his back. As he shifted and stretched, his gaze drifted over to the house, and he met her eyes with his own blue ones. He nodded a greeting to her, smiled, and went back to his work, as if they were old friends and she expected him to be there.

Now, Alice knew pretty well everyone in the valley, but although she felt as though she ought to know him, she couldn’t quite seem to place his face.

She set down the cup, dried her hands on her skirt, and stepped out into the twilight.

“Good evening!”

He straightened up once more, and, brushing off his hands, stood to face her.

She wandered over to where he’d been working, “Do I know you?” She asked. “You look familiar, but I can’t seem to think of your name. Are you from around here?”

He smiled once more. “I think you could say I’m both from here and not.” He closed the distance between them, holding out his hand. “I’m Adam.”

As he took her hand in his own, it occurred to her that even his touch felt familiar.

“Alice.”

He pulled her closer, enveloping her brown, calloused hand with his own — porcelain white.

The tarp against the garden wall fluttered briefly, then was carried away in the wind.

 


End file.
